Today marks 20 years since the release of Radiohead‘s breakout album ‘The Bends’. Though the band shot to fame with their ‘Creep‘ single in 1992 (which has been frequently covered since its release, at least 36 times on record), it wasn’t until ‘The Bends’ that the band begun to garner critical acclaim and respect from independent music aficionados. A pleasant counter-point to the Britpop movement of the time, ‘The Bends’ occupies a unique place in “classic album” territory – it’s considered by many to be one of the last great straight-up ‘Rock’ records before the genre hit stagnation or its major acts (including Radiohead themselves) pursued a different sonic path. Here we run down some of the most interesting samples of and covers from this now-classic rock album.
Planet Telex – In hindsight, the epic opening track of ‘The Bends’ gently hinted at Radiohead’s future experimentation with electronics and synthetic textures. The recently disbanded UK hip-hop duo Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip‘s ‘Letter From God to Man’ utilised the pre-verse chords as the backdrop to Scroobius Pip’s poetic and biting lyrical flow, before mashing up the chorus and main hook with the Amen break to create the track’s glorious jungle-esque final minute. Discussing the sample with the BBC around the time of the release of their debut album the duo said; “We were quite devious and used everyone we knew. We knew Rob da Bank was seeing one of their producers so we made sure he had a copy. Then we got this message saying they’re going to have a listen to it.” (Dan Le Sac) “Because it had taken so long, we’d almost thrown in the towel on it……..It [the response] was brief, like ‘You have band approval for this’, but that was enough for me.” (Scroobius Pip)
Just – Mark Ronson (in collaboration with Phantom Planet) provided a chart-friendly horn-filled funk cover of ‘Just’ on his 2007 covers album ‘Version’. A DJ shadow-era UNKLE sampled a brief snippet of the song’s climax on Intro (optional) – a “hidden” track on certain versions of their debut album ‘Psyence Fiction’ (only available by rewinding the first track on certain CD players). Thom Yorke also appeared as a guest vocalist on the penultimate track of that album – the David Axelrod-sampling ‘Rabbit In Your Headlights’.
The Bends – The title track has been given a thrash make-over by the metal sub-genre leaders Anthrax and was sampled by Massive Attack towards the end of ‘False Flags‘. Thom Yorke and 3D (Robert Del Naja) are known to be good friends and like-minded collaborators, they famously DJed at the London site of the Occupy movement in late 2011 and more recently have scored the film ‘UK Gold’, a documentary about tax avoidance in the City of London.
Street Spirit (Fade Out) – Joe Budden sampled the famously depressing arpeggiated guitar riff from Street Spirit on mixtape track ‘Never Again’. One of the band’s most successful singles (achieving a #5 placing on the UK chart), ‘Street Spirit’ has been re-done by classical piano cover artist and NPR radio host Christopher O’Reily, who has also provided his own take on other ‘The Bends’ tracks ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Black Star’, ‘Nice Dream’ and ‘Bulletproof… I Wish I Was’. Cringeworthy joke-rock band The Darkness also covered the song on their 2012 record ‘Hot Cakes’.
Words – Henry Macleod (@airbagmusic)
